fredag 3 januari 2014

Brick stitch bitch

Wool and steel is what gives a Reenactor her power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together. This one, however, is not about wool but silk.

I've tried my hand at German brick stitch a few times, not least so I could buy the droolworthy yarns from Devere. At first I was a bit wary, I never thought I would have the patience to finish a piece, and I could really picture the hissyfits I would throw in the face of an irreversible, structural fault that would force me to abandon a near-finished pattern. Turns out, brick stitch has an even worse tetris potential than most other crafts, and since the designs are easy to either stel off the interwebz or create in a robotlike fashion, people without any real artistic skill (like me) can make their own and still pull it off.

Plus, you get to think of this guy EVERY time, and laugh.

We are never alone in our crafting. I have received a lot of inspiration from the lovely blogs of my friends and acquaintances, such as Medieval Silkwork,...ur ett insnöat liv and the pages of some people who are completely unknown to me personally, like Racaire and Wymarc. This summer I attended a workshop on brick stitch in the Battle of Wisby camp, and that was my final excuse for a new kind of hoarding.

The Devere color charts are sort of tricky to get hold of since they're sold out right now, so I took some reference pics in decent light - I will have to give them back to Vix who kindly let me borrow them.

For starters I made a trial pattern on graph paper, and I made a HUNDRED mistakes in simply drawing it, so I'm glad I tried without the actual embroidery first. This page offers free graph paper for printing. I ended up making just the one panel, so I might turn it into a needle roll or a pincushion.

This is how it turned out.

Then I made two panels for a bag, and was instantly punished for my sloth: I figured, the less threads per cm in the linen weave, the less work, but this can apparently be overdone as the coverage suffered...

Damn you, lazy woman!

Maria tells me that smaller purses are usually double-sided, with embroidery on both sides. Larger bags may have just the one side worked, and the other plain, with maybe a picture motif. I really like the variety of options, picture motifs / geometric patterns or a combination of the two, with brick stitch as a filler in gaps between figures.

I'm really anxious about piecing the panels together and making the actual purse. Let's see if I can bring myself to make a blog post about the process further on.